


shroud

by Lies_Unfurl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Crying, Drinking, Emotionally Hurt Dean, Episode: s12e23 All Along the Watchtower, Gentle Sam Winchester, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Dean, Implied Relationships, M/M, Mute Dean Winchester, POV Sam Winchester, Season/Series 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 16:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10948422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lies_Unfurl/pseuds/Lies_Unfurl
Summary: Post 12x23. Dean mourns, and Sam tries to keep things together.





	shroud

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [葬](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10986174) by [InnocentDays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InnocentDays/pseuds/InnocentDays), [Lies_Unfurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lies_Unfurl/pseuds/Lies_Unfurl)



> also available in Chinese [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10986174), thanks to [InnocentDays](http://archiveofourown.org/users/InnocentDays/pseuds/InnocentDays).

“Get the house ready to burn. I’ll take care of Cas,” is the first thing Dean says to Sam after – well, after. 

Sam stumbled out of the house with every intention of telling Dean what he saw: Kelly, at peace; the footprints; the child who wasn’t a child; feral golden eyes that blinked and disappeared right before him. When he saw Dean in the same place where he had left him, words fled out of his mouth, and he dropped to the ground, next to Castiel’s body. His hands trace the burnt dirt.

He never realized how fragile Castiel’s wings were, how sparse the feathers and misshapen the bones. He wonders if they hurt. Why neither he nor Dean ever bothered asking about them.

Sam nods in response to Dean’s orders. Right. Take care of things. That’s what they’ve always done. Can’t stop now. He lopes over to the Impala and opens the trunk, removing several of the cans of lighter fluid they keep there. He leaves a few for Dean. 

When he comes out of the house, he expects to see a pyre already burning. There’s nothing in the backyard. No Castiel, no Dean. 

He frowns and walks in the direction of the Impala. Has to stop when he’s halfway there so he can breathe. His throat is so tight. He doesn’t know how his body functions at all with all the grief roiling inside.

The doors to the backseat are wide open, and Dean kneels beside them. When Sam makes himself move closer, he sees that Dean’s forehead is pressed to Castiel’s hand. 

He tosses the gallons of lighter fluid back in the trunk and goes to his brother. Dean gives no indication that he hears him, or that he feels Sam’s grasp on his shoulder, a laughably inadequate comfort.

“We bury him at the bunker,” Dean says hoarsely. “That way when we get him back, he’ll know where he is.”

Sam nods. “Yeah. Of course.”

He sees now that Castiel is laid out on a large canvas they keep tucked away for messes like this one. When Dean stands, he carefully, almost lovingly, folds the sheet over Castiel’s body. He tucks the edges into the seat and runs a hand over it, smoothing down the creases.

“Want me to drive?” Sam offers.

Dean shakes his head and wipes at his eyes. “No. Thanks. I, uh. I can’t just sit there doing nothing.”

Neither of them is in any shape to be driving, let alone driving the hours they have ahead of them in a single stretch. Sam doesn’t say anything.

They drive east into the rising sun, the cabin on the lake blazing behind them. It looks like a beautiful May day, the sky ablaze with pinks and orange. The tightness in Sam’s throat has moved to his stomach, an aching nausea with nothing to expel. Nothing this morning has a right to be so beautiful. 

It should take a solid day to drive back to the bunker, but with the speed Dean’s going, and the number of breaks they take (one, shortly after noon, pulled off to the side of the road in a woodsy, empty stretch so the two of them can piss into a forest) they end up rolling in around midnight. 

Sam cracks his back as he stands, wincing. It’s been a long time since he felt this stiff or sore, or tired. He dozed for short stretches while on the road, but they weren’t restful. Not when they involved waking and finding out that the events of the past day were real.

Still, no matter how his body screams at him to stretch, to sleep, to shower, he takes the shovel that Dean tosses from the trunk. They begin digging wordlessly, just to the right of the bunker’s entrance. It’s warm, and crickets chirp all around. Something screams in the distance. A coyote, maybe, or a fox in heat. They could be in a graveyard at any other moment in Sam’s life, uncovering the bones of a restless spirit. This shouldn’t feel so goddamn _normal_.

Except this time, they don’t dig six feet. Sam guesses that they’re at four, four and a half at the most when Dean stops. 

“That’s good. We shouldn’t go any deeper.” He scrubs at his eyes, smearing dirt over his face. “When you gotta make your way up from a grave – six feet is a lot. It was for me. We don’t even have a casket for him.” 

He’s rambling, but Sam gets the gist of it. He nods.

Dean removes Castiel’s body from the backseat, something reverent in his slow, deliberate motions. He lays him on the ground next to the grave and lifts the canvas.

“Help me get his coat off. I want. I’ll fix it. Sew it up for him.”

Sam nods again. He lifts Castiel’s torso, helps Dean work his arms free from the jacket. There’s so little blood. Angels don’t bleed when they die, do they? They just burn.

When it’s off, they rest Castiel back on the cloth. Dean touches his cheek.

“You need a minute alone?”

“No. ‘s fine.” It’s not.

Dean wraps the body again. He hesitates when it comes to covering Castiel’s face, his back bowed and shoulders shaking. Sam waits.

Dean is the one to put Castiel in the grave. He doesn’t ask for Sam’s help, and Sam doesn’t offer. It’s not his place. He knows that, no matter how much Castiel meant to him.

It takes them at once too long and not long enough to fill the hole. Sam’s vision blurs halfway through, some combination of tiredness and tears. He moves on autopilot, until he can’t even feel the wood of the shovel’s handle burning against his palms.

When it’s done, Dean gathers up the coat and they move indoors like ghosts. Sam needs sleep more than anything, but he stands in the kitchen, watching, as Dean throws the coat over a chair and opens a cabinet. He pulls out two shot glasses and a bottle of scotch, fills them both and thrusts one over without bothering to ask Sam if he actually wants it (he doesn’t. He doesn’t say no, though).

“To Fergus Macleod. You were a damn bastard, but you came through in the end.” 

Dean slams their glasses together a bit too hard and drinks, and Sam can see the edges of his brother rapidly fraying. So when Dean refills the drinks and raises his and starts to say, “To C—To Cas—,” he’s prepared to catch him as he crumples, glass slipping out of his fingers as Sam lowers him safely to the ground.

Dean shoves him away, tries to stand, then falls hard on his knees and keens, an animalistic sound somewhere between a sob and a scream. Sam reaches over and pulls him into his arms, but it’s like Dean doesn’t even know that he’s there.

“I never told him. I never told him. I never—I never—”

“He knew. He knew,” Sam says over and over again, rocking Dean back and forth. He presses his face against his brother’s hair, holding him tight while Dean cries and cries.

In the moment, he doesn’t realize that it’s the last time he’ll hear his brother’s voice for over a month.

When Dean falls silent (still shaking, tears still making tracks through the sweat and the dirt on his face), Sam stands both of them up, arm wrapped tightly around Dean’s torso. With his free arm, he reaches out and grabs the coat. Dean takes it from him wordlessly, holding it to his chest like a security blanket.

They’re both disgusting from hours on the road. They both desperately need to eat. But Sam brings Dean to his room all the same, sitting him on the bed, taking off his shoes.

“Do you want me to stay?” Sam asks. He tries to read Dean’s expression, but as far as he can tell there’s nothing there but grief.

Dean shakes his head and rolls over onto his side, back to Sam. His face is buried in the coat.

It hurts to walk away from his brother, with all the other losses that they’ve dealt with in the past forty-eight hours. Sam does anyway, knowing it’s best, knowing what Dean’s resentment will be like if he thinks he’s being treated as a child.

And as soon as Sam’s face hits his own pillow, he’s asleep.

*

It’s around 3:00 in the afternoon when Sam goes to Dean next, after having slept a deep sleep and taken one of the longest showers of his life. Because he knows his brother, he brings with him water and a bottle of aspirin.

He’s disappointed, but not surprised, to see an empty flask of whiskey on Dean’s bedroom floor, one he’s sure wasn’t there before. There’s a half-full bottle of vodka as well. Sam has no way of knowing how full either of them were when Dean started, but he can guess. 

If it wasn’t for the liquor, he would have thought that Dean hadn’t moved since he left. He’s still on the bed, still on his side. Sam can just see a hint of tan fabric lying under him.

“Dean.” No reaction, but he knows by the breathing that he’s awake. “Dean.”

He sits at the foot of the bed and gently shakes his brother’s shoulder. Dean cranes his neck and opens a bleary, puffy eye crusted with dried tears.

“Here.” He pours out the medicine and holds it out, water in his other hand. Dean stares at it for a moment and then, moving with an arthritic slowness, sits up and takes them from him. After he’s gulped them down, he moves to lie down again. Sam grabs his shoulder.

“Hey. I know our sleep schedules are going to be royally fucked up for a while, but it’s the afternoon. It’s been what, three days since you last ate anything that wasn’t from a gas station? And longer since you’ve showered. Do me a favor, man, and get washed up. I’ll put something together. And then you can go back to sleep.”

Dean curls back in on himself, and Sam sighs. He looks down at his brother for a moment, weighing his options carefully. He shouldn’t use the big guns lightly – but he knows how hungry Dean must be, how achy his back and his muscles from the nonstop fighting and driving and digging. 

He remembers when Jess died, how Dean had, carefully and persistently, urged him to eat, to get up, to keep on going. And he’d had an enemy to fight then, revenge to keep him moving forward. Dean doesn’t. Not in this universe, at least.

“He healed you,” Sam says quietly. “He wouldn’t want you to be hurting like this.”

Dean is still. Sam tenses, ready to defend himself if his brother springs up and attacks him for going there, for prodding into his weakest spots.

Instead Dean sits up, carefully untangling himself from the trench. He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then stops. His hand touches his throat and he looks up at Sam through bloodshot, desperate eyes, and Sam understands.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to talk.” He reaches out his hand, and it’s a sign of how off Dean is that he takes it without a protest, letting Sam lead him into the showers.

In the kitchen, Sam cleans up the shot glass that Dean dropped and then makes some sandwiches. They’re almost out of food. He’s going to have to face the outside world sooner than he really wants to. 

Dean comes in after a half hour or so. He still looks awful, haggard, like he only just stopped crying (and maybe he did). Though Sam knows he can’t have changed too much physically in the past day, he looks thin, sleep pants and sweatshirt loose around his frame.

“Here.” Sam pushes over a plate with Dean’s favorite. He’s pleased, really, when Dean manages almost half of it before getting up and shambling off to his room.

*

At some point, the bunker stopped feeling like a base and started feeling like home. Sam can’t say when. He only notices because now the absence of that safety is so prominent. They had gotten rid of the bodies of Ketch, Lady Bevell, and all the nameless Men of Letters before they left, but the memory of the invasion looms around every corner. Sam finds himself always running his fingers through containers or on the undersides of surfaces, checking for bugs he might have missed. Nothing is the same, and it isn’t just the absences.

The days drag on in silence. Dean texts Sam what he can’t say, but it’s okay, not an inconvenience at all, really, because there’s nothing to talk about.

They spend their time reading, mostly. Looking for spells that might rip a hole in this reality that somehow leads to the universe their mother is trapped in. Looking for information on how to bring back a dead angel. After a week of nothing, Sam expands the search to try to find anything on angel deaths at all – what happens, where they go.

Dean spends a good deal of time online. He’s presumably tracking the news for signs of Jack, but there isn’t much. Sam catches him once just staring at a black screensaver, eyes empty. He doesn’t mention that he saw it to Dean, but he does double his efforts to get Dean moving. Hunts are out; Dean’s in no shape to be interrogating victims. But Sam suggests that he try repairing the damage the grenade did, and that gets him up for a bit. Even if his eyes are dull and he moves mechanically the whole time.

He is getting thinner; it’s not in Sam’s mind. If Sam gets any food at all into him twice a day, it’s a victory.

Sam takes over the grocery runs and the liquor runs (because as much as he hates it, he knows Dean can’t even begin to process everything if he’s sober, and at least this way he knows his brother isn’t drinking the cheapest rotgut he can get his hands on). He takes over talking to other hunters who try to pass cases on to them, or who ask if they’ve seen any hints of the Nephilim’s location. The answer is always no.

It’s so empty, Sam realizes one day. Just him and Dean. He was so used to hearing Mom knock, or to Crowley popping in, or to Castiel opening the door. There’s just… nothing. They aren’t waiting for anything, just hanging in suspended animation in a world that doesn’t give a shit.

He's angry. He’s furious that after everything he and Dean have given, this is what it comes to. Prayers to Chuck go unanswered, not that he expected otherwise.

He begins running again in the mornings. He can’t run from his problems, but he can work out some of his anger through the pounding of his feet against the packed dirt, the air ripping from his lungs. If it doesn’t make things better, it at least doesn’t make them worse, either.

Sam is up at sunrise for one of these runs when he almost trips over Dean’s prone form coming out of the bunker.

“Shit, sorry, I—”

His words break off as Dean scrambles upright, pulling the trench coat closer to his chest, and Sam’s sluggish mind gradually processes the implications of what he’s seeing.

“Did you sleep out here?” he asks before he can stop himself.

Dean looks away. He runs his hand over the bare dirt, like that’s an answer. It kind of is.

“Okay. Yeah. I mean, it’s warm out. Nothing wrong with that, I was just… surprised.” No response, not that he expected one.

Sam crouches down, trying not to think of Castiel, less than five feet beneath them. “It’s all right. If it makes you feel closer to him. Or if it helps at all. Or if it doesn’t. Just. Whatever you need.”

Dean still doesn’t meet his eyes. Sam wonders if this is the first time he’s done this. Something tells him otherwise, that this is just the first time he’s caught him.

“Hey. I’m going for a run. You want to get your shoes on and come with?”

That gets Dean to glance up. He hesitates, searching Sam’s face like there’s some sort of trick. Sam waits.

Finally, he nods and gets to his feet. He glances to the bunker door and raises an eyebrow at Sam -- _one minute_? – and Sam nods.

After Dean has disappeared inside, Sam kneels down and presses his palm into the dirt of Castiel’s grave. “Thanks,” he murmurs. An early summer wind sighs in the trees.

*

It gets better after that.

Not a lot, but better.

Most mornings, Sam finds Dean asleep outside, holding or covering himself with Castiel’s coat. Most mornings, Sam wakes him up and asks him to join. Most mornings, Dean does.

He draws Dean out of his shell, little by little. He gets him to text Jody, Claire (she knows already, of course. Sam called her. It should have been Dean, but she deserved to hear it in words, not read it on a screen). Some nights they sit up and watch TV together. Not talking. But it’s okay.

One day, after about a month, Sam heads to Wichita to buy a book on interdimensional travel from an antiquarian book dealer Garth knows. When he comes back late in the afternoon, he finds Dean in the kitchen, cooking. 

It takes years of acting as an impartial law enforcement officer for Sam to keep his face neutral. He knows that Dean would be put off at the combination of shock and delight that the sight calls forth in him, and he can’t risk driving Dean back.

“Smells good,” he says as he heads to the library to shelf the book. He leaves before his smile breaks through.

The real breakthrough is a week later. It’s Tuesday, rest day (Sam deliberately refuses to rest on Sundays, luxuriating in the small disobedience against rules that Chuck probably had nothing to do with). Sam sleeps in later than he intended. When he wanders into the kitchen, he finds coffee, but no Dean.

He’s not in the library either. Not in the garage, or his bedroom.

Sam frowns. It’s past 10:00. He shouldn’t still be sleeping outside. The sun would have awoken him. And anyway, there was coffee.

He decides to check outside just for the hell of it. When he opens the door, he stops short. This time, his face can’t hide his surprise.

Dean is on his knees, trowel in hand. Where there was once grass and weeds surrounding Cas’s grave, there are now a variety of plants. Seeds are scattered over the grave itself.

Dean glances up at him. Judging by the sweat on his face and the sunburn emerging on his nose, he’s been out here for a decent amount of time. Sam doesn’t see anything left to be planted.

“Hey,” Dean says, voice rough and scratchy, and Sam almost drops his coffee.

“Hey.” He climbs the rest of the way out of the bunker and sits down next to his brother. “What’s all this?”

“These are coneflowers,” Dean says, pointing to bunches of purple flowers with bulging centers. “That’s goldenrod. The little ones are gonna be asters.” He indicates some delicate-looking plants that are more buds than flowers. “The rest is lavender. Oh, and the seeds are this kind that the garden center sold. To help attract honeybees. All of them are supposed to be good at that.” 

He pauses. “I thought he’d like that.”

Sam nods. “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

They sit outside for a little while, not talking even though they can. Birds sing somewhere in the distance, and a soft wind stirs the flowers.

“You’re getting sunburned,” Sam says finally. “C’mon. Let’s get something to eat.”

He stands and stretches out a hand to help Dean up. He accepts, and they walk into the bunker, side by side.

 

 

When Castiel comes back a month later, the flowers are all in bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> recently developed a tumblr @ lies-unfurl.tumblr.com. come prompt me.
> 
> hope everyone is recovering from the episode. comments are much appreciated.
> 
> edit 5/24: beautiful art, also courtesy of [InnocentDays](http://archiveofourown.org/users/InnocentDays/pseuds/InnocentDays), can be found [ here ](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=20aw6ja&s=9#.WSUKUMa1vIU) :)


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